alc tests

Folks,

Today and tomorrow (I'm off on Friday) I will be playing with alc. We
have got a server running on whois.ripe.net, port 7667, with currently
only the RIPE database loaded. Although I have seen it dump core a few
times, I think most of these were actually caused by wrong
modifications to the config file by me. Some early feedback and things
to think about [these are mainly operational things]:

- the RIPE database supports immediate updates in the whois server.
People that send in ASs or networks want to test whether they have
done things right almost instantly. Restarting alc every minute or so
is currently the only answer, but with 40 seconds to read the RIPE
database, this does not look very attractive to me. We may need to
think of a way to have alc show a similar behaviour as updating the
database (ie almost instantly)

- When a DB file is read as a flat file, the alc process is enormously
big, almost 15 Mb with only the RIPE database read. This could give
some severe performance problems for other services running on the
same machine. The answer is simple I know, get another box, but we
don't have another box. Reading a DBM index in stead of a flat file
reduces the size of alc to around 7 Mb.

- aggwalk is works against the test alc server we have running

- aggwalk -A <attribute> only shows real attributes as defined in the
config, no aliases. So in the RIPE alc server you cannot ask for
aut-sys but have to ask for homeas ...

That's all for now, I'll get back with more later.

-Marten





-------- Logged at  Wed Apr 27 14:54:34 MET DST 1994  ---------